Abstract
I assess G. A. Cohen’s claim, which is central to his luck egalitarian account of distributive justice, that forcing others to pay for people’s expensive indulgence is inegalitarian because it amounts to their exploitation. I argue that the forced subsidy of such indulgence may well be unfair, but any such unfairness fails to ground an egalitarian complaint. I conclude that Cohen’s account of distributive justice has a non-egalitarian as well as an egalitarian aspect. Each impulse arises from an underlying commitment to fairness. Cohen’s account of distributive justice is therefore one of justice as fairness.
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Notes
In 1995, p. 204, Cohen notes that this claim must be qualified in order to take account of “ignorance and accident.” I take account of this qualification in note 4, below.
I infer this clause from the following: “… for [the capitalist’s appropriation of part of the worker’s product] to constitute exploitation, it needs to be shown … that it is an injustice, that the relevant transfer of value is unfair” (Cohen 1988, p. 233).
Here I am generalizing somewhat from Cohen’s more specific resolution of the question of the exploitation of the worker by the capitalist into the question of the moral status of capitalist private property. Even if, however, we stick to Cohen’s less sweeping claims regarding specifically capitalist exploitation, the price-gouging example I am about to present will pose a problem for him, as it features a propertyless worker and a capitalist employer. Moreover, all of the examples I discuss in this section involve labour contracts into which individuals in desperate need are coerced.
The existence of a reasonable, risk-free option differentiates this case from one that Cohen sketches in which an insurance company “goes bust and thereby … ruins the lives of people who could not have known that its position would come to be exposed, people who now have to sell their assets voluntarily … for a snip …” (Cohen 1995, p. 46). I agree with Cohen that the distributive upshot is unjust in his case. I would also maintain, however, that such a distributive upshot involves bad brute luck for the losers that would be regarded as unjust on any sound account of luck egalitarianism. For more on the notion and significance of a reasonable, risk-free option and its moral importance, see Otsuka (2002, 2004).
See note 2, above.
In Rescuing Justice and Equality, Cohen refers to his “published embrace [in “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice”] of what has been called luck egalitarianism, which is the view that identifies distributive justice with an allocation which extinguishes inequalities that are due to luck rather than to choice” (Cohen 2008, p. 300). It is such identification that commits Cohen to the biconditional of clause (iv), above. (See also note 23, below.)
I am indebted to Andrew Williams for pointing out, in private correspondence, that Cohen need not affirm such a sufficient condition.
As Andrew Williams explains (see note 7, above), an imperative to eliminate involuntary disadvantage leaves “many choices between distinct property systems underdetermined.” Williams maintains, for example, that involuntary disadvantage might be absent from each of the following two systems: “a more libertarian system which empowers individuals to take the gamble” of not insuring against natural disaster in the price-gouging example and “a less libertarian system that subjects them to a corresponding disability by forcing them to insure against the risk in question.”
The following analogy will be helpful to some: Cohen would thereby be invoking a principle of nonexploitation to select among involuntary-advantage-eliminating property systems, where this principle plays a role that is structurally analogous to Ronald Dworkin’s (2000, Chapter 3) principle of abstraction that selects among envy-test-passing property systems.
See the sentence quoted at clause (i) in the main text two paragraphs above. Such an identification of exploitation with unfair advantage taking is not idiosyncratic. Alan Wertheimer, for example, has written the book on exploitation (Wertheimer 1996), and the first sentence of Wertheimer’s Stanford Encyclopedia entry on the topic reads: “To exploit others is to take unfair advantage of them” (Wertheimer 2008).
I shall explore the extent to which this appearance mirrors reality in Sect. 2.
It is perhaps worth noting that Cohen’s identification of the primary egalitarian impulse with, inter alia, the extinction of the influence of exploitation on distribution suggests that he does not acknowledge that exploitation might have an influence upon distribution that is other than an unequalizing influence.
Cohen describes the Fortnum’s customer as “wasteful” because he converts resources into welfare inefficiently by spending more money than is necessary to achieve a given level of welfare.
My ascription of this belief to Cohen is based on a certain amount of conjecture, since Cohen does not spell out what it is for a distribution of burdens to count as exploitative. The only clues he offers in “On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice” as to what he means by “exploitative” in this context are his remark quoted earlier that a “person is exploited when unfair advantage is taken of him” combined with his remark that the “primary egalitarian impulse is to extinguish the influence on distribution of … exploitation” (Cohen 1989, p. 911). (Cohen also writes that “the grounding idea” of his account of egalitarian justice is “that disadvantage is to be redressed when it reflects either exploitation or bad luck” (Cohen 1989, p. 937). But this is simply a restatement of claims he makes in the passage on p. 911).
In a comment on an earlier draft of this paper, Cohen replied that you free ride when you reap a benefit that you would normally and properly have to generate by yourself by relying on others’ producing it for you. This is, he maintained, objectionable even if you do not gain any advantage over others. I do not see, however, how a free rider could fail to gain an advantage over others, where that advantage is gaining the thing at no cost, which others pay some cost to obtain. Here I am assuming that productive labour is costly. Perhaps Cohen had in mind cases in which labour is costless. But I do not see why it would be objectionable for you to gain, at no cost to others, from their costless labour, where the advantage that you and they gain is an equal one.
The wasteful person does not gain any advantage when measured in absolute (rather than relative) terms either: his wastefulness has the consequence that his (and everyone else’s) absolute level of welfare is lower than it would have been if he had not behaved in wasteful fashion.
These are respects that Robert Nozick (1974, p. 169) exploits when he argues, in a somewhat different context, that redistributive taxation is on a par with forced labour.
See the passages from (Cohen 1995, p. 151) that I quoted at length in Sect. 1, above. There is perhaps an independent moral objection of “parasitism” in all of the cases mentioned in this paragraph—i.e., of living off of the fruits of another’s labour. Presumably, however, Cohen would qualify the scope of any such objection so that it does not apply when the parasitism arises against a background of equality, since otherwise the infirm capitalist would wrongly be condemned as a parasite.
Moreover, unlike the above case, it does not appear to be an example of parasitism, since it does not involve one person’s living off the fruits of the labour of others. Rather, it simply involves a reduction of the share of others’ natural resources.
Cohen offered this reply in conversation about an earlier draft. What follows is a rational reconstruction of the dialogue between him and me that ensued.
As Cohen (1989, pp. 918–919) brilliantly notes, difficulty and costliness are not one and the same. He notes that it is difficult to cycle to Heathrow with someone else sitting on one’s bike, but this might not be costly, as one might enjoy the exertion and the challenge. It is, by contrast, costly to write a large cheque to someone. But this is not difficult, as it merely involves a few strokes of one’s pen. See also Cohen (1978, pp. 238–239).
I believe, however, that Peter Vallentyne would dispute this charge of unfairness, so long as the policy was known to all in advance. See his critique of the “Natural Rewards” principle in Vallentyne (2002, pp. 550–556).
The kind of equality with which he identifies distributive justice is, of course, equality of access to advantage, as Cohen makes clear when he affirms in Rescuing Justice and Equality that he “still believe[s]” in “luck egalitarianism, which is the view that identifies distributive justice with an allocation which extinguishes inequalities that are due to luck rather than to choice” (Cohen 2008, pp. 8 and 300).
Cohen’s luck egalitarian account of distributive justice should not, however, be conceived as encompassing every sort of fairness. The non-egalitarian claims of fairness (a)–(d) in the previous paragraph are, for example, in conflict with distributive justice, so understood.
References
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Nozick, R. 1974. Anarchy, state, and utopia. New York: Basic Books.
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Wertheimer, A. 2008. Exploitation. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/exploitation/>.
Acknowledgments
This paper was originally presented at a conference in Jerry Cohen’s honour at Oxford in January 2009. I am grateful to Jo Wolff for his commentary on that occasion. I also thank Véronique Munoz-Dardé, Thomas Porter, Hillel Steiner, Peter Vallentyne, Alex Voorhoeve, Andrew Williams, and Gabriel Wollner for their comments. In composing this paper, I greatly benefitted from discussions with Jerry, some of which I have reconstructed in the main text above. I miss such conversation and so much else.
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Otsuka, M. Justice as Fairness: Luck Egalitarian, Not Rawlsian. J Ethics 14, 217–230 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-010-9081-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-010-9081-z